Quotes from Donna Tartt

But I think maybe it's more like a column of figures where you add two numbers wrong at the start, and it throws the total. If you trace it back, you can see the mistake – the point where you would have had a different outcome.

It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we shiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely?

It was a state which might have seemed a suspiciously narcotic one except that it differed so little from his customary manner.

I never got used to the way the horizon there could just erase itself and leave you marooned, adrift, in an incomplete dreamscape that was like a sketch for the world you knew—the outline of a single tree standing in for a grove, lamp-posts and chimneys floating up out of context before the surrounding canvas was filled in—an amnesia-land, a kind of skewed Heaven where the old landmarks were recognizable but spaced too far apart, and disarranged, and made terrible by the emptiness

I've come to believe that there's no truth beyond

The ice cream slows down your digestion. The coke settles your stomach and the caffeine cures your headache. Sugar gives you energy

Blacks and blues, that's the ticket, blacks and blues.

strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed.

An invisible, bedrock rightness that reassured me just as it was reassuring to know that far away, whales swarm untroubled in Baltic Waters and monks in arcane time zones chanted ceaselessly for the salvation of the world

A goodbye at the gate," said Hobie. He seemed to be talking partly to himself. "That's what he would have wanted. The parting glimpse, the death haiku—he wouldn't have liked to leave without stopping to speak to someone along the way. 'A teahouse amid the cherry blossoms, on the way to death.

The line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn't matter if it's been through the Xerox a hundred times. [...] You know what Picasso says. 'Bad artists copy, good artists steal.' Still with real greatness, there's a jolt at the end of the wire. It doesn't matter how often you grab hold of the line, or how many people have grabbed hold of it before you. It's the same line. Fallen from a higher life. It still carries some of the same shock.

the world won't come to me,' he used to say, 'so I must go to it'—

E le notti, più grandi di quanto sia immaginabile: nere, immense, spazzate dal vento; caotiche e pazze di stelle.

The minister, who took his ecumenical and—some felt—slightly impersonal remarks from Saint Paul's sermon on Love from First Corinthians, talked for about half an hour. ("Didn't you feel that was a very inappropriate text?" said Julian, who had a pagan's gloomy view of death coupled with a horror of the non-specific.)

but does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end-and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it's possible to play it with a kind of joy?

Beauty is terror. We want to be devoured by it, to hide ourselves in that fire which refines us.

And if beauty is terror, then what is desire?

I am a Californian by birth and also, I have recently discovered, by nature. The last is something I admit only now, after the fact.

I thought (erroneously) that he dressed like Alfred Douglas, or the Comte de Montesquiou: beautiful starchy shirts with French cuffs; magnificent neckties; a black greatcoat that billowed behind him as he walked and made him look like a cross between a student prince and Jack the Ripper.

All things fall and are built again.

Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls – which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make us feel more miserable than any other thing? But isn't it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think?

I soffitti rimandavano un eco spettrale, che conferiva a quella disperata ilarità la qualità di un ricordo sin dal momento in cui l'ascoltavo, ricordi di cose che non avevo mai conosciuto.

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it... We want to be devoured by it, to hide ourselves in that fire which refines us.

What? said Charles, interrupting him. What did you say? You said Julian's gone? I must compliment you, young man, on your grasp of the English language.